Phoebe Robinson Quotes

A lot of the time, unfortunately for women, there's not a lot of complex roles. I don't mean complex like tortured or whatever. I mean complex like there's more going on with them than, 'I'm a mom.'

There are so many female roles - particularly for young women - that are just somebody's girlfriend or somebody's daughter, or that are accessories to the main story rather than being three-dimensional characters.

All the other characters are so well-rounded, and it's just frustrating because female characters aren't. It's not that they're badly written, they're just underwritten. They have no internal monologues; they could be absolutely anyone.

There is this idea that you have to play heroines or women who succeed.

I think male roles are generally much better written. So for actresses, we're always dealing with trying to inject a role with more truth than the writer possibly had in mind.

We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.

An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

Far too often, I read a script where the girls are the girlfriend or the set dressing.

The truth is, there are so few female roles in movies. That's really limiting. As an actor, you wanna be able to sink your teeth into something. You don't want to just be the best friend. You don't want to just be the girlfriend.

With a male-centric show, the women are usually very two-dimensional.

Part of the problem is that many directors treat female characters too often as precious. Or they want to live in a fantasy world where they just do spinning hook kicks and knock out guys who are six foot four, and that doesn't work either.

I get the feeling that characters are written female when they have to be, and all the other characters are male, and it doesn't occur to somebody that the lawyer, the best friend, the landlord, whoever, can be female.

When I was just starting out, I had two choices: I could be the beautiful girl on the main man's arm as decoration, or I would have to do a little independent movie to get any depth in the female character.

I became interested in educating people in the variety of ways in which women can express their emotion. Which is much easier to do in a large role than in a supporting role to a male protagonist. In general, the women in a supporting role to a male protagonist - cry a lot.

A lot of animated movies in the past have sort of relied on these archaic tropes on what the female characters in those movies can be and who they are.

Most female characters have either been the temptress - like a Betty Boop type - or the victim - like an Olive Oil type.

In commercial cinema, roles for heroines are limited to being simple or glamorous. I don't want to fall into an image trap.

All too often, female characters, in particular, aren't multi-layered enough.

Women's roles in the movies remain, for the most part, girlfriends, mothers, wives.

A lot of times, female characters - particularly the villains - come off as very one-dimensional. They get the short shrift in that they're only given the snappy comeback, or they're relegated to a very stereotypical role. I want to know what's driving them - that's what's really interesting.

We heroines don't get good roles.

It happens a lot that women have to play the girlfriend role, which isn't as three-dimensional as the male role.

I started writing In Darkness out of a frustration of the quality of roles that I was reading in scripts for women.

I'm not sure that it's easy to find very interesting female characters in Hollywood movies.

A lot of times [in the movie industry], women are relegated to playing the wife or girlfriend or daughter.